Each Wednesday, The World Africa presents three new musical releases from or inspired by the continent. This week, head to Senegal with the new albums of bassist Alune Wade and kora player Ablaye Cissoko, as well as the return of singer Coumba Gawlo after a long silence.
“Café Oran”, by Alune Wade
Watch out, gem! On Friday May 20, bassist and composer Alune Wade released his fifth album, Sultan, real trip between West Africa, North Africa and Ethiopia. Co-founder in 2010 of the University of Gnawa group alongside Aziz Sahmaoui, the Senegalese is not content to explore the rhythms of Gnawa music but mixes his jazz with Afrobeat, Sufi songs, Arab-Andalusian music, ethiojazz… Listening to the disc, it is a whole imagination between Africa and the Orient that parades, as evidenced by the titles of the twelve tracks: Saba’s Journey, Portrait of Moor (with Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali), Djolof Blues, Café Oran… Magistral.
“Third Z”, by Ablaye Cissoko & Cyrille Brotto
If Alune Wade has surrounded himself with a slew of musicians, it is in a duo that Ablaye Cissoko and Cyrille Brotto have chosen to make us wander with their album Instant, published on May 6. The Senegalese’s kora and the Frenchman’s accordion take us to new territories, between Paris and Saint-Louis. The two men met at Cyrille Brotto’s, who had organized an Ablaye Cissoko concert there in complete privacy. The current has obviously passed. on the piece Third Z, the Mandinka artist, from a family of griots, evokes his mother, who died shortly after birth: “Neither fatigue nor suffering will prevent me from looking for you”, he sings in his caressing voice.
« Tekk Gui », by Coumba Gawlo
Also descending from a long line of griots, Coumba Gawlo published in March the clip of Tekk Gui (“Listen to the silence”), a track from his latest album, Terrou Where (2018), in which she pays tribute to her father, the artist Laye Bamba Seck, who died in 2017. This reappearance of the singer with 136,000 subscribers on YouTube was a relief for her fans, when she had announced her retired from the stage, a year earlier, for health problems that had impaired his voice. After surgery, here she is back: “You will now see me playing the piano while singing”, announced the one who took advantage of this forced break to learn this instrument.
Find all the musical favorites of the editorial staff in the YouTube playlist of the World Africa.